New Course: Build Apps for Both Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8

Microsoft Virtual Academy is offering a new Jump Start course for developers who wish to build apps for both Windows 8/RT and Windows Phone 8. According to the firm, this course targets developers with some experience developing for Windows Phone and features guidance, best practices, patterns and techniques that will then deliver apps for both platforms.

Windows 8 and Windows are not the same platform. This module will cover how they are different by going over the UI and XAML, Platform specific features and reviewing the data model and supporting code.

This session will go over Data binding basics and look further into Dependency object and property. It will review properties for binding specifically INotifyPropertyChanged and INotifyCollectionChanged, and include business logic to respond to user actions in the view.

This module introduces the user to MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel), the architecture and the Pros and cons. It will provide and overview for how to share code using MVVM, .NET portable class library as well as going over best practices and providing a wealth of resource information.

Ben creates live demos to show examples of how to maximize code reuse. This final segment will include an overview of reuse techniques such as portable library, shared source code, inheritance, conditional compilation, partial classes and methods.

Maybe I'm missing something but you can run Windows 7 on a Hyper-V VM and access it thru the "Modern UI" Remote Desktop Client.
(or so I'm told, I've never actually managed to do it, but, in my defense I hate networking and infrastrucutres)

I have written a WinPhone 7/7.5 App (which also runs unchanged on WinPhone8) where the code was used as a basis for a Windows 7/8 Desktop Application and then this code was used as a basis for a Windows 8 Metro App. In each case about 70%+ of the code was re-used. In writing the metro App, I needed to use the SQLite database instead of using the .sdf database that was used in the WinPhone/Win 7/8 Apps which was the major code change otherwise a higher percentage of code would have been re-used. My development included using three books written by Charles Petzold: 'Applications = Code+Markup' to learn WPF/XAML (knowing this makes the others much easier to understand), then 'Programming Windows Phone 7' which can carry over to WinPhone 8 and then 'Programming Windows -Sixth Edition for Windows 8 Apps with C# and XAML'. These books require a knowledge of C# and are excellent. They easily step one through the process for each type of application/device and the examples really work and code for all examples can be downloaded. They discuss the characteristics of each device (phone/touch tablets) and OS to provide an understanding how the code needs to be written to utilize and to take advantage of their idiosyncrasies.

What I Use

Like many, I was hoping to see a new Lumia flagship before the end of 2014, and while I was pleasantly surprised in some ways by both the Lumia 735 and 830, neither offers the level of performance or best-in-market camera quality I had come to expected from Microsoft/Nokia's high-end devices. So I pulled the trigger on an unlocked Windows Phone flagship that will hopefully take me through at least the first half of this year. Or until Microsoft gets off its low-end fixation and satisfies the needs of its biggest fans....More

It's been a while since the last What I Use, but there haven't been many major changes since late last year: Surface Pro 3 has become my go-to travel companion, I've added a third cellphone line for testing Windows Phone, Android and iPhone side-by-side, and have rotated through some new tablets and other devices. We've also switched from FIOS to Comcast and added to our set-top box collection....More